What Are These Strange Lights on the Dwarf Planet Ceres?

The bright spots are (probably) salt or volcanoes, but we can pretend that it's really a secret massive spaceship

Ceres isn't the boring old rock we thought it was. It's a rich little world of its own with some growing mysteries around it. For instance, what the heck are these lights?

As the Dawn spacecraft approaches the drawf planet, it took this picture of two mysterious lights at the basin of a crater, seen from a distance of 29,000 miles. They were previously observed as a single bright spot, but the recent pictures reveal there to be not one but two light sources.

There are perfectly natural, reasonable reasons that might explain the lights on Ceres—which, in addition to being a dwarf planet like Pluto, is also the biggest thing in the Asteroid Belt. The formations are simply something brighter than the rest of the surface, reflecting 40 percent of the light that hits them.

Ceres may have a subsurface ocean

There are a few possible culprits here. There's circumstantial evidence that, like some of Jupiter's moons, Ceres may have a subsurface ocean. Thus, the two spots may be ice. There's also the possibility that Dawn is seeing highly reflective volcanic rock, or some strange combo of the two—icy rock produced by cryovolcanism (ice geysers.) It also could be salt, which could be related to cryovolcanism as well, especially if there is a saline body of water under the surface of Ceres.

In a little more than a week, the Dawn spacecraft will enter orbit around Ceres. From its initial orbital height of 8388 miles, it will begin measurements of Ceres before dipping down to just 919 miles above the surface. It will shine a new light on the world and its origins, and, we hope, find out what's behind these lights. Who knows: it could even find new hope for discovering extraterrestrial microbial activity, since where there's water, there can be life as we know it.

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